The contaminated Silver Valley Region is home of one of the EPA's most notorious contaminated "Superfund" sites -- the Bunker Hill mine site in Kellogg, ID. While much progress has already been made on the Bunker Hill smelter site, attention is now turning to the area along the150 miles of the Coeur d'Alene river basin, from Montana to Washington state, creating the nation's largest Superfund site.
For more than 100 years, mines in a 40-mile strip of the Idaho panhandle produced much of the nation's silver. The mining and smelting released lead and other dangerous metals into the Coeur d'Alene River Basin. The river carried those metals into Lake Coeur d'Alene, and then into Washington through the Spokane River.
In 1983, the EPA declared a 21-square-mile area around Kellogg a Superfund site. Since then, it has spent more than $200 million cleaning it up. Now the agency is proposing to expand that clean up to 1,500 square miles.
The work would at first focus on lead, arsenic and other heavy metals left over from mining and smelting of metals. This would be right in line with the company's proprietary IESCRETE(R) process of remediation.
As previously announced on Feb. 20, Enviro-Energy is currently undergoing a full field test of the IESCRETE(R) process sponsored by the Department of Energy. The IESCRETE(R) process had also been identified by the EPA as one of the best-performing, lowest- cost systems for stabilizing and capping mine tailings. IESCRETE(R) is only one of many technologies or services within the environmental remediation and reclamation group of Enviro-Energy Corp.
As a full-service, design-to-build company, Environmental Reclamation Inc., the company's principal subsidiary with headquarters in the center of the Silver Valley, is expected to be eligible to provide many of the technologies and/or services needed for this undertaking.
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